As a designer and a Tesla driver, I’m both struck by the potential of the in-car interface and plagued with ideas I’m eager to see implemented. Being on sabbatical, I’ve found myself with a bit of extra bandwidth as I’m wrapping up the book I’m writing, so I’ve started mocking…

How I found myself in a battle of ideas with Elon Musk — (For folks who prefer to listen instead of read, you can watch a video version of this article here.) After much anticipation, Tesla’s v11 interface update was finally arriving, and for the Tesla faithful, this was like a yearly holiday. They waited for their yearly Christmas present from Jolly Old…

The mistake even the best design teams make, and how it can be avoided. After months of anticipation, Tesla finally released a shiny new UI update for their vehicles — v11 is here! Tesla drivers rushed to install the update, excited to play with it. But as they started spending…

The Beatles are widely considered to be one of the most creative bands the world has ever seen — for many, the group is the first thing that comes to mind when they hear the word “creativity”. Luckily for us, that legendary creativity was on full display in the new…

A few days ago, I ran across a tweet by Jared Spool that had been making the rounds again. I weighed in with my own thoughts which led to a friendly and substantive debate on the subject of dashboards. …

What are the primary sources of friction your users encounter in your app? An app can have a lot of complexity, which can make it difficult to pin down the primary pain points. Like a hotel, an app can have many branching paths leading to different areas. In a hotel…

During last month’s WWDC, Apple announced what they call “a new way to discover apps”. And it’s true, this new feature will help people discover new apps, but there’s more to it than that. There are some big improvements to the Learnability and Ergonomic Friction of getting an app onto…

The Usability of a product is only part of the story — there’s an important difference between how easy it is to learn a new app (Learnability) vs. how easy it is to use once it has been learned (Ergonomics). While Learnability is widely understood, Ergonomics doesn’t get nearly the…

Yesterday, the Texas Medical Association released a Covid-19 risk chart, showing the relative risk involved with various common activities. This is a brilliant move — one that I’ve been eagerly awaiting and one I desperately look forward to seeing others expand upon. Since the start of the pandemic, we the…